scholarly journals The seasonality of three childhood infections in a pre-industrial society without schools

Author(s):  
Michael Briga ◽  
Susanna Ukonaho ◽  
Jenni E Pettay ◽  
Robert J Taylor ◽  
Tarmo Ketola ◽  
...  

Background: The burden of many infectious diseases varies seasonally and a better understanding of the drivers of infectious disease seasonality would help to improve public health interventions. For directly transmitted highly-immunizing childhood infections, the leading hypothesis is that seasonality is strongly driven by social gatherings imposed by schools, with maxima and minima during school terms and holidays respectively. However, we currently have a poor understanding of the seasonality of childhood infections in societies without schools and whether these are driven by human social gatherings. Here, we used unique nationwide data consisting of >40 epidemics over 100 years in 18th and 19th century Finland, an agricultural pre-health care society without schools, to (i) quantify the seasonality of three easily identifiable childhood infections, smallpox, pertussis and measles and (ii) test the extent to which seasonality of these diseases is driven by seasonal social gatherings. Methods: We quantified the seasonality of transmission using time series Suscpetibel-Infected-Recovery models, wavelet analyses and general additive mixed models.Results: We found that all three infections were seasonal and the seasonality patterns differed from those in industrialized societies with schools. Smallpox and measles showed high transmission in the first half of the year, but we could not associate this with seasonal human gatherings events. For pertussis, however, transmission was higher during social gathering events such as New Year and Easter.Conclusions: Our results show that the seasonality of childhood infections is more variable than previously described in other populations and indicate a pathogen-specific role of human social aggregation in driving the infectious disease dynamics.Funding: Academy of Finland (278751, 292368), Nordforsk (104910), the Ehrnrooth Foundation, the Finnish Cultural Foundation, the University of Turku Foundation and the Doctoral Programme in Biology, Geography and Geology, University of Turku.

Doxa ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 85-96
Author(s):  
Olena Pavlova

The paper is devoted to the study of the role of fictional discourse and literary culture in the formation process of the Modern public sphere. It is proved that this sphere was rooted in the genesis structures, which were represented by the following oppositions of the literary field: author’s production – mass consumption, closed and open fields of artistic production, self-reference and other-reference, signified and signifier. The dynamic structure of fictional discourse allowed to maintain the unity of the human, who was not determined by birth, but constructed himself. The permanent identification and the interpretations conflict became the content of the communication of the public circles of the Modern society (table conversations, clubs, salons and magazines). The institutionalization apogee of the literary field was the formation of literary culture – the content of education of the English model of the university, which balanced between the Scylla of the canon and Charybdis unification of industrial society.


PLoS Biology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (11) ◽  
pp. e3000938
Author(s):  
Jason R. Rohr ◽  
Jeremy M. Cohen

Climate change is expected to have complex effects on infectious diseases, causing some to increase, others to decrease, and many to shift their distributions. There have been several important advances in understanding the role of climate and climate change on wildlife and human infectious disease dynamics over the past several years. This essay examines 3 major areas of advancement, which include improvements to mechanistic disease models, investigations into the importance of climate variability to disease dynamics, and understanding the consequences of thermal mismatches between host and parasites. Applying the new information derived from these advances to climate–disease models and addressing the pressing knowledge gaps that we identify should improve the capacity to predict how climate change will affect disease risk for both wildlife and humans.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-20
Author(s):  
Péter Telek ◽  
Béla Illés ◽  
Christian Landschützer ◽  
Fabian Schenk ◽  
Flavien Massi

Nowadays, the Industry 4.0 concept affects every area of the industrial, economic, social and personal sectors. The most significant changings are the automation and the digitalization. This is also true for the material handling processes, where the handling systems use more and more automated machines; planning, operation and optimization of different logistic processes are based on many digital data collected from the material flow process. However, new methods and devices require new solutions which define new research directions. In this paper we describe the state of the art of the material handling researches and draw the role of the UMi-TWINN partner institutes in these fields. As a result of this H2020 EU project, scientific excellence of the University of Miskolc can be increased and new research activities will be started.


Accurate pronunciation has a vital role in English language learning as it can help learners to avoid misunderstanding in communication. However, EFL learners in many contexts, especially at the University of Phan Thiet, still encounter many difficulties in pronouncing English correctly. Therefore, this study endeavors to explore English-majored students’ perceptions towards the role of pronunciation in English language learning and examine their pronunciation practicing strategies (PPS). It involved 155 English-majored students at the University of Phan Thiet who answered closed-ended questionnaires and 18 English-majored students who participated in semi-structured interviews. The findings revealed that students strongly believed in the important role of pronunciation in English language learning; however, they sometimes employed PPS for their pronunciation improvement. Furthermore, the results showed that participants tended to use naturalistic practicing strategies and formal practicing strategies with sounds, but they overlooked strategies such as asking for help and cooperating with peers. Such findings could contribute further to the understanding of how students perceive the role of pronunciation and their PPS use in the research’s context and other similar ones. Received 10th June 2019; Revised 12th March 2020; Accepted 12th April 2020


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veronika Keir

<div class="page" title="Page 3"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>Veronika is a recent graduate from the Honours Legal Studies program at the University of Waterloo. Her passions are socio-legal research, policy development, feminist legal theory, and crime control development. Veronika is currently working a full-time job at Oracle Canada, planning on pursuing further education in a Masters program. </span></p></div></div></div>


2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Possamai ◽  
Arathi Sriprakash ◽  
Ellen Brackenreg ◽  
John McGuire

As universities in Australia are faced with a growth in diversity and intensity of religion and spirituality on campus, this article explores the work of chaplains and its reception by students on a multi-campus suburban university. It finds that the religious work of these professionals is not the primary emphasis in the university context; what is of greater significance to students and the university institution is the broader pastoral and welfare-support role of chaplains. We discuss these findings in relation to post-secularism theory and the scaling down of state-provided welfare in public institutions such as universities.


2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
James Cox

Earlier this year, I received a small grant from the Edinburgh University Development Trust Fund to determine the feasibility of formulating a major research project exploring the religious dimensions within the recent land resettlement programme in Zimbabwe. Since spirit mediums had played such an important role in the first Shona uprising in 1896–97 against colonial occu¬pation (the so-called First Chimurenga) (Parsons, 1985: 50-51) and again in the war of liberation between 1972 and 1979 (the Second Chimurenga) (Lan, 1985), I suspected that these central points of contact between the spirit world and the living communities would be affecting the sometimes militant invasions of white commercial farms that began sporadically in 1998, but became systematic after the constitutional referendum of February 2000. Under the terms of the grant, I went with my colleague, Tabona Shoko of the University of Zimbabwe, in July and August 2004, to two regions of Zimbabwe: Mount Darwin in the northeast, where recent activities by war veterans and spirit mediums had been reported, and to the Mberengwa District, where land resettlement programmes have been widespread. This article reports on my preliminary findings in Mount Darwin, where I sought to determine if evidence could be found to link the role of Traditional Religion, particularly through spirit mediums, to the current land redistribution programme, and, if so, whether increasing levels of political intolerance within Zimbabwean society could be blamed, in part at least, on these customary beliefs and practices


Author(s):  
Erwin Erwin ◽  
Nasarudin Nasarudin ◽  
Husnan Husnan

The purpose of this research is to explain the importance of the student organizations and describe their efforts to improve the speaking skills of students at the Mahad Khalid Bin Al Waleed at the University of Muhammadiyah Mataram. This research uses the qualitative approach with the descriptive type. The result shows the student organizations play an important role based on their objectives and functions. The objectives are to help the foundation and all parties in the Ma'had develop the students’ potential and qualification, and to be the place for the students to share their problems and complaints, while the functions are as one of the media to develop students’ quality, both the members of the non-member, and as the good examples and pioneers of any good deeds. The efforts done by student organizations in improving speaking skills are such as by making activities that lead to improving students' speaking skills like sticking vocabularies in each class and Friday activities such as language game, Arabic debate and short lecture.


Politeia ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela Johnson

As members of the secret Afrikaner organisation, the Broederbond, two of the apartheid-era rectors at the University of Fort Hare were responsible for leading an institution that was supposed to spearhead the modernisation of ethnically defined homelands and their transition to independent states, whilst disseminating apartheid values among the black students. Based on unsorted and unarchived documents located in the personal files of the apartheid-era rectors, which included secret correspondence and memoranda of clandestine meetings, this paper illustrates the attempted exercise of hegemony by the apartheid state through its linked network with the university administration during the period 1960 to 1990. This is achieved by demonstrating the interaction between the state, Broederbond rectors and the black students at Fort Hare, who were subjected to persuasion and coercion as dictated by the state’s apartheid vision of a racially defined and separated society.


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